by Joe Wilhelm Jr.
Staff Writer
The warmth of giving helped defeat the chill of 50-degree weather Friday.
Members of the Jacksonville Association of Fire Fighters joined members of Builders Care, the charitable arm of the Northeast Florida Builders Association, Friday to begin renovations on the Lillian Saunders Center in the Spring Park section of the Southside of Jacksonville. The renovations will accommodate the center’s new tenant, Family Nurturing Center of Florida. The organization worked with The Jacksonville Journey to earn the opportunity to manage the property and plans to have the center opened in 6-8 weeks. That schedule was helped by the contributions of the Fire Fighters Union.
“They helped us get done in one morning what it would take two of us to do in a week,” said Clancy Rebman, project manager with Builders Care. “They saved the taxpayers a lot of money this morning.”
Family Nurturing Center (FNC) of Florida offers an environment where children can safely meet their parents for supervised visitations and exchanges. It also provides information to help adults learn to be better parents with support and educational programs offered throughout the area. FNC opened in 1993 as the Family Visitation Center, and it was the first of its kind in Florida. Then Circuit Court Judge Dorothy Pate developed the program after hearing complaints from parents who were denied access to their children who had been placed in foster care.
The Bartley Circle facility will be the organization’s fifth location and once Builders Care has completed renovations, FNC will offer their core services including supervised visitation, monitored exchange, and parent education at the center. FNC has also reached out to other agencies including Youth Crisis Center, Jacksonville Hospitality Institute and Hubbard House to offer expanded resources to the community through the new center. In addition to the services discussed above, the center will provide facilitator training, which helps train both parents and professionals in the Nuturing Parenting program. Students from Douglas Anderson School of the Arts will also be utilizing the center. Douglas Anderson requires students to complete community service hours and they can fulfill those hours by providing area residents with the opportunity to participate in workshops and classes which will be hosted by students. Hubbard House will offer its Helping at Risk Kids (HARK) program, the Youth Crisis Center will offer individual and family crisis counseling and Jacksonville Hospitality Institute will provide life skills and food service training to children between the ages of 16-22.
The center’s multi-use will not only extend to these agencies, but the community will also continue to use the building as a meeting place for a variety of programs, such as bingo, coffee gatherings and neighborhood meetings. The Family Nuturing Center plans to host a monthly “Family Night” with a potluck dinner “to provide a safe nurturing environment for parents and children to become more familiar with their neighbors.”
The partnerships that have been developed through this project and the outreach to the community made it easy for the City to get behind the Family Nuturing Center proposal.
“The managing partnerships we’ve established through ‘The Jacksonville Journey’ with organizations like the Family Nuturing Center are great examples of collaborations that work for the community in our efforts to make Jacksonville a safer place,” said Mayor John Peyton. “As a city government, we know we do not have all of the resources to provide all needed services so we reached out to the community for partners. Family Nuturing Center took that one step further by creating collaborative partnerships with an even wider variety of organizations to extend their services and activities.”
The project has been about a year in the making and now that the renovations have begun Family Nuturing Center Executive Director Stella Johnson has been surprised about how much has been done is such a short time.
“We knew that Builders Care was a special construction organization, but when they got all of those fire fighters to show up on Friday, I didn’t expect that type of response,” said Johnson. “It’s amazing how much they have gotten done already.”
Clad in a knit hat, gloves and layers of clothes to keep himself warm in the 50-degree weather at the Lillian Saunders Center, Neal White, vice president of Jacksonville Association of Fire Fighters, IAFF Local 122, said it was an easy decision to help with the renovations.
“It’s the right thing to do,” said White. “And we enjoy doing it.”
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